this is a photo taken today from the bbc website showing traditional morris dancers celebrating the dawn of may day. morris dancing is an exceptionally cool dance which uses sticks and handkerchiefs.
(editted by andy so we dont get sued by getty for using one of their photos without permission!)
those of you not in the UK might like to know that 'ta muchly' is english slang for 'thank you very much'. it is also the name of a business my friend has set up while she has two very small children. her products are lovely - she makes them all while her little ones are sleeping or otherwise engaged.
i'd really encourage you to have a look and start stocking up for the rest of the year's birthdays, celebrations and even Christmas while we're at it!!
here is a video of a woman called totoshko who is a friend of my brother oli. she lived with my parents a bit while staying in cheltenham. anyway, the boys and i were looking at some photos of them while they were staying with my folks a couple of weeks ago and there's one of them with totshko. so we looked her up on youtube and here's her 'moment':
if honesty is the best policy then what does it say about our government policies and procedures when honesty seems to be disputed at every point. i've just received some documents through today, regarding the government process that's the bane of our lives (currently), and reading them just reminds me how much our honesty is questioned constantly, refuted and just simply denied. then i even noticed that there was at least one error in the minuting of the document i was reading. sometimes it feels that because the system we are in is so 'day in day out' to the professionals involved, the details aren't important to them and yet when it comes to challenging our 'honesty' they are very quick to jump on the details.
but then i try to hold it lightly in view of the fact that it'll all come out in the wash when God does his laundry - it strikes me more and more each day how ridiculous, and yet genius, it is that God's foolishness is greater than our wisdom. i just love it that God admits that He's foolish (whatever that means) and therefore that foolishness is part of being made in the image of our creator. ooh - what a shift in the way we saw each other if we started to celebrate each other's foolishness!!
if abraham lived today and God told im to go kill isaac, what would he have done, and what would have been the consequences?
on sunday i watched the london marathon round at my next door neighbour'shouse and i sat and cried through a lot of it. the thing that got me was the interviews, when the tv presenter was stopping certain people running and interviewing them asking what they were running for ad how much they were hoping to raise. most people were running because they had been directly or indirectly affected by some kind of challenge/battle and part of their chosen fight was to raise money and run the marathon. this gutted me because in my current battle it's not one i've chosen, it is one that i only believe i can win because i choose to keep trusting God (and if i don't win this battle i choose to trust God in that too). i felt a whole bunch of self pity, grief, deep sorrow and a kind of over-whelming helplessness.
so right now i am putting my hope into the day when the battle i am in ends and i can choose a battle to fight. it has even crossed my mind to choose to fight the same battle agin (but this time on my terms) and perhaps run the marathon and raise money to support others going through what we're going through.
the title of this post isn't there just to be funny. it's really a serious reflection. we look at the story of abraham and isaac and see his amazing faith, his conviction to obey God, God's provision in the light of said obedience. but today? would od still ask someone to do that and what would be the consequences? the child protection procedure is a giant beast writhing around in he lovely multi-aency culture we see ourselves in where using bubble bath on a seriously eczma'd child (becasue you believe God told you to and interestingly washed the eczema away for just over a week) is seen to be a pointer to significant harm/risk. sadly one of many misunderstood actions and words taken to the same end point.
or Lot in sodom and gomorrah who turns out his virginous daughters (likely under 18) to the crowds so that the 'stangers' are spared the lustful desires of the town's men. where do we look at that and reflect on sexual child abuse and the sexual culture of that city in general, rather than banging on (excuse the term) about gay relationships when it has always seemed to me that the story of sodom and gomorrah is much more about hospitality than anything else, which is the context where Jesus himselfs refers back to it (Matt 10:11-15).
i am thinking about a few things at the moment. whether i'll blog much about them or not i'm not sure. but one of the things i'm reflecting on a lot is how i feel about the fact that i don't get many comments. you see, i realised that as write a blog and also keep a personal journal, the blog is something i do for others as well as for myself. of course, i like the fact that a blog is always stored on t'internet somewhere so should anyone ever wish to publish my works or write a film about me anything i've blogged will be already archived and nicely ordered and all links will make sense and as it's typed there'll be no hurdles such as my often illegible handwriting - i have taken to writing in my personal journal while people pray for me and i can barely read it myself at the end. however, somehow it makes that praying experience an active one for me when sometimes i've felt quite passive when people have prayed for me - even at toronto (so stone me!).
i think my point is that where i used to feel validated by comments i now feel validated just for being me. i am coming home to myself as naomi aldort suggested to me yesterday. but your comments still mean a great deal to me - they are the relational side of my blogging. if what i was blogging was just for me i'd put it in my personal journal but i put it here for you too - i suppose i hope it might spark discussion, edify you, encourage you, inspire you (did you know that i inspire you? - private joke with the lovely niki foote so noone be offended by my apparent arrogance!). i'm certainly not expecting comments like the blog of the inspirational (and currently bored) andrew jones but then i don't feel my blog deserves that level of following!
maybe a lot of this is linked in with my experience of facebook and why i decided to kill off my profile. even if it is linked it's not the same - facebook really was messing with my experience of being me and who my friends were. i don't miss it at all - but then i am all about relationship, and what's more, relationship that goes deeper than what you're up to on a saturday night and the fact that you wished me a happy birthday because facebook reminded you to! for the first few months i was on facebook i wished people happy birthday as a result of facebook's reminder and then i stopped. i started just wishing happy birthday to the people i would try to wish it to anyway. this, admittedly is not as easy since i lost my address book. but i hope my address book will turn up when we move house.
want to blog but feel i have little to say right now. we are just sitting down to watch casino royale with yummy daniel craig. i'm going to carry on doing some knitting too.
lovely jen comes home this month - i am very excited!
we have some very lovely friends called brian and whitney who live in the states. they are an inspirational family - brian for single handedly converting the world to homebrew, and whitney for being a beautiful woman of great depths of love and insight. i popped onto their blog today and saw the following youtube video.
i have commented a couple of things on brian and whitney's blog but i have lots of other thoughts about this issue of us a species having the power to determine the future of virtually all other species. that is a profound and serious responsibility - one that God gives us at the very beginning of all things. God says to adam, "Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge! Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth." (the message) The Cambridge dictionary defines the phrase'responsible for as "to have control and authority over something or someone and the duty of taking care of it or them"
So we don't only have control and authority over creation (which is the part that humans seem to have no problem exerting, sadly to creation's demise. we also have the duty to take care of creation - of the plants and animals and birds and fish etc etc. definition for 'duty' by the way is "something that you have to do because it is part of your job, or something that you feel is the right thing to do".
so if you stand under the authority of God then looking after creation is part of our job even if we're not in a place of feeling it's the right thing to do. i know a few christians who still think that there are more important things in life than considering your consumer choices, such as food, clothes, oil, and more or the way you live your life with the little things such as only boiling enough water for the amount of coffee you're making, drinking tap water not bottled, using energy saving lightbulbs, recycling.
but then there are many many people who don't knowingly stand under the authority of God and yet are responding to being made in the image of God by taking on their duty to take care of creation because they feel it is the right thing to do. we have an awesome friend called treehouse claire. ok, so really she is called claire, but she lives in a treehouse on a protest site so we call her treehouse claire. well, claire is the only christian on that protest site and yet it would seem to me that her site-mates are stepping up to God's blessing of responsibility for taking care of creation and trying to protect it in radical ways.
i am in the middle. very radical when you put me next to some people but next to others i have a long way to go! although, raising children does seem to me a phenomenal opportunity to model and pass on the values of taking responsibility for creation. my journey though has been one of taking little steps and i think that's the only way it can happen. so many people feel defeated by the sheer enormity of the task at hand when they look at the state we have gotten ourselves into. but when you take one little step of change and it becomes part of your daily life you can then take on another small change. so examples of small steps might be: 1. start buying eco cleaners and washing detergents. 2. buy organic food. 3. buy food from local businesses not supermarkets as much as possible. 4. recycle. 5. turn lights off and switch to eco bulbs. 6. only boil as much water as you need. 7. put a lid on your pan and make sure the flame the pan sits on isn't creeping up round the sides of the pan where it is ineffective. 8. drive less (this is my big challenge) 9. give money regularly by direct debit to organisations working for change. 10. buy the good shopping guide and use it!
ok. lots of stuff there. hope it isn't too full of hot air! i'll try and find some interesting links that will say things with reliability and hopefully be more inspiring.
one last reflection on the blessing God speaks over adam and eve. i think the order of his commands is interesting and spot on for where we are today. we have prospered, but in a way that has led to extreme inequality of wealth distribution, thus poverty is one of the most significant issues facing the majority of the world. we have reproduced. we have filled the earth, not only with people but with large amounts of disgarded waste, toxins and greenhouse gases. we have taken charge but in way that is gradually killing the planet and already killing people around the world due to famine, drought, changing climate and abusing people due to consumer demand for cheaper food, cheaper clothes, more oil, exciting holiday destinations. so the next command God gives is to take responsibility and with that i would challenge myself and the world to take on board God's words in 2 chronicles 7:14 " Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land." new living translation).
the drummer is ben - jos' godfather and one of our dearest friends. this band are amazing live and recorded and they look pretty delicious too!
if you like it tell poeple about it - nothing bad will happen to you if you don't tell and nothing good will happen to you if you do - this isn't one of those cahin mail spam things!!
yesterday robin and i were in London. we had a great day. met with shannon and did big lick ice-creams and saw big ben. also went to the southbank centre where i bought a book for andy. it is such a great book that i am directing you to it on amazon
the title of this post is a quote by shane claiborne from the simple way community in philadelphia. i have heard shane speak several times and he is always challenging, provocative and oozing grace. but i have never heard him say this quote about the poor.
and it really hits home. it is uncomfortable because for me i think i do love the poor and feel i stand strong against injustice but then i think to myself, "who are the poor in my life?" and i start to struggle. i can remember the poor from my past who i used to hang out with and even gave a roof over the head to but not now. and it's easy to think nice thoughts that comfort me in my happy middle class existence such as, 'but i'm loving those i'm in community with', or 'i'm focusing my energy on fighting for justice for local farmers and local businesses', or 'God has me fighting a massive battle of justice right now and i don't have time for anything else'. these things are all true but, as shane points out, when jesus tells the story about the beggar lazarus sitting outside the rich man's gates, only the beggar is given a name and it is lazarus, the poor beggar, who God saves. just like God saves the widows and the orphans and those in slavery or excluded from society.
i don't know where to move on to from this point. just know that i am challenged by it. what does it mean to love the poor if not to be in relationship with them and know their name? to know their lives and troubles and sadness but also their joy and celebration.
once a month we celebrate a full moon pizza party. it is part of our experience and expression of church. a very good friend who is also a follower of Jesus challenged me on it because they were concerned that it was a little too similar to the way NOS expressed church at times. being put in same sentence as NOS is nothing new to me and i value this friendship highly and i am glad it has the strength and trust to allow for such questioning. it was also a really positive question for me becuause i was able to process my reflections on our full moon pizza party in a way i hadn't fully done before. below is my response to my friend's enquiry:
for us it is a way of stepping into one of God's rhythms, that of the moon. in the bible God said to celebrate/recognise the new moon and then in the NT he says not to worry about it but we wanted to get in touch with some of these things but the full moon was easier to get the kids into, in a visual way and pizza is like a full moon because it is round and pale (before toppings!!). it is a time when friends and community come together and bring and share their toppings and some poeple bring dough too. there are so many reflections on it that excite me and lead me towards Jesus and the Father. such as:
-the full moon is the moon's full reflection of the sun which leads me to consider what it looks like for us to fully reflect the son.
-coming together to eat is something Jesus did much of, with believers and those who did not yet believe. he also welcomed the hospitality of those who did not yet believe and i enjoy sharing food that is the amalgamation (right word?) of the hospitality of believers and non believers.
-it is a time of wonderful conversation, laughter, children playing and general catching up which seems to happen less and less in reality now that facebook and other online forums are so popular.
-weekly pizza parties are something our friends andrew and debbie jones have always done for as long as we've known them (6 years). the jones' and the pizza parties always inspired us amd so in creating our own pizza party ritual it feels like we are joining in corporate fellowship with them as our faith community/tribe.
-also, as i think about the full moon i become more aware of the moon in general and finding myself engaging with one of the first rhythms God created connects with my spirit.
i think the next step for me is to get my head into the biblical framework for this bit of our church. when God leads me clearly through lots of confirmation from different sources i don't feel the need to look it up in the bible. but maybe this would be a good discipline to get into, undertaken with a big handful of grace - it's not like i sit around twiddling my thumbs looking for things to do with my day!
oh the sun will come out tomorrow i have been singing to josiah and now the sun is out and it is beautiful and my windows are flung open and my spirit is soaring and the Spirit who dewlls within me is up to tricks and i feel a season of healing and freedom upon me. i am reminded a lot in recent conversations of one of my favourite quotes by the dalai lama, "one must know the rules in order to break them properly" or something along those lines. i think i am stepping into a time of embracing my sensible eccentricity as someone recently described me. i think sensible is not quite right but we will see. i am wearing creative clothes again, i am sewing, the other day i was inspired to make a birthday card and a birthday gift - i have not had the creative energy to make cards for soooo long. and the garden has received the touch of my hands in the last week or two and will no longer be neglected as it was last year. and i shared communion with my dear friend juliet this morning - a wonderful feast of pancakes and mashed banana, greek yogurt, chopped hazelnuts and maple syrup. perhaps i am going to start falling in love with myself - about bloody time.
so back to sorting and cleaning and making the way straight.
shine on me so i reflect Your glory, live in me so people see Your beauty, and pour on me so out of me flow streams of Living Water. (gareth robinson)
bring on the full and intense light of the sun and the Son.
haven't blogged for ages - really not sure if anyone reads this blog at all anymore, but for what it's worth, if you are reading then i thought i'd give you my first thoughts on skipping.
skiping - not the rope game you play at primary school but the art of getting free food from skips - the best ones seem to be M&S and waitrose.
we have claire (aka treehouse claire) staying with us for a bit. claire has lived for long time on a protest site near edinburgh and they don't buy food they skip it. so what you do is got to a skip at the back of a supermarket and take your shopping bags with you and look for rich pickings. there are ground rules such as, don't make a mess, leave the bin as you find it (including tying up bags you open and not tipping unwanted food out into the bin), don't jump fences or break and enter (too naughty even for me) and keep cool if the securtiy or police ask you questions.
aside from the obvious things about the art of skipping which are: 1. free food 2. keeping waste out of landfill becasue you eat it and then recycle packaging 3. exciting nighttime adventures
you're also doing other things like making a really important stand for the hard work of others and the damage to the environment caused by our food industry.
for example, in the last couple of days we've rescued prefectly edible food which has been produced in kenya and israel. both these countries are places of serious unrest at present and yet they worked hard, possible for little money, to make a perfect looking grapefruit (possibly getting ill in the process from chemicals used by farmers) or other product which we have then decided is no longer wuite good enough for our western p[alettes. goodness knows why - they look amazing.
or simply that these foods get produced so far away that the cost to our pockets and to the earth for their transportation becomes insulting when we so quickly discard them as unwanted and our wallets just pay the price elsewhere for this waste. the cost to the environment is then worsened, like adding salt to an open wound, by putting the produce and it's packaging in landfill thus adding to many problems we are already dealing with in our country.
last night we came back with a treacle tart, a steak pie, 2 apple pies, 4 figs, 4 punnets of raspberries, 3 punnets of bluberries, a basket of flowering hyacinths, loads of assorted veg, bread, chocolate puddings, crisps, thai green chicken curry, 4 cucumbers, 4 tubs of aaorted margarine, a bottle of fresh juice, stuffed peppers, posh cheeses and other stuff that i can't remember right now.
when the police did a drive by (at the back of waitrose) they were polite and listened to our clear explanation that we were getting food. they asked if we were really that hungry and claire explained that we weren't hungry at all but thought it was unnecessary so much food had to go to waste and all the police said was 'be careful'. they watched from their car for a couple of minutes then drove off. talk about sharing the good news!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
To say reflections makes it sound like I have gathered my thoughts and mulled them into a coherent and interesting piece of writing but as an extrovert processor the result of my reflections is nothing more than the jumbled mess in my head splurging onto the page!!
So...
I am either a total loony tune with severe mental health problems or my imagination gets taken control of by external forces. The spiritually sensitive among you will get what I'm saying but to the rest of you I suppose I sound ridiculous. However, this assault on my mind that happens every so often made me start thinking about the imagination.
As children develop we really encourage the imagination and then as children grow up, perhaps go to school we start to tell children where to use the imagination and where not to and also we start to give children an idea of what is appropriate for their imagination to be doing, while at the same time introducing them to movies and other cultural influences that put new stuff in their imagination, good and bad.
By the time children are adults we have a pocket, some larger than others, in our heads which seems to hold our imagination. If an adult is confident in expressing and using their imagination it seems that they can respond to live really creatively so problems in life can be an exciting challenge of thinking 'outside the box' or boredom doesn't become much of a problem because they can go somewhere else in their head. For people who suffer from stress and anxiety, the imagination is used as a tool to help them find a place of rest or calm. So it seems that there are times when it's ok, even encouraged, as an adult to engage your imagination.
Then there seem to be the times when the imagination is seen as the root of problems, so adults who feel dissatisfied because they have unrealised dreams and hopes, or the case where someone has great vision for something and noone takes their idea seriously. The support of the community around that person can bring life or death to that vision. As an entrepreneur I know that I have millions of ideas, some of them ridiculous but others getting close to brilliant(!), and it is because the majority of my community are so supportive that I find myself able to pursue these things, even if that pursuit doesn't move from thought into action. Then there's the way the imagination gets labelled as the root of religious faith, perhaps the idea that God speaks to a person gets blamed on their imagination or for those who are more sensitive to the spiritual 'stuff' they appear to have mental health problems because they describe what feels like an external assault on, or interaction with, their mind. Too often we label people with 'an overactive imagination'.
Or I suppose there is the way our dreams can be so fleeting that we barley remember them in the morning, or so real that when we wake we are confused by what has been happening. I wonder where our imagination is in all of that - how much of our dreams are simply our heads processing the stuff of the day, our worries or hopes. If, then, dreams are not necessarily imagination we should be open to people who have a spiritual experience in their dreams, without writing it off as 'just your imagination'.
Coming back to the journey our imaginations take from childhood to adulthood I wonder how we can be counter-cultural in that with our own children and the children around us. In an age where 6 year old girls want a mobile phone and want to be sexy or worry that their body isn't quite right, I feel that something has gone terribly wrong. I remember at 6 I was living in my imagination a lot of the time. I had no awareness about my body then apart from it's physical capabilities and whether I could climb that tree and make a house up there to hide out in and then all the stuff that might happen in my new life living up in that tree where nobody could find me! or the way my imagination let me own and care for ponies and ride them around and groom them for hours and hours.
if we could be counter-cultural and stop the 'curbing' of our imaginations and our children's imaginations where could we be? a neighbour of ours writes film scripts in his spare time and I hear he lets his imagination dream up awesome things with positive environmental impact. But they stay on the page of paper because as a culture we don't have space for dreaming dreams and letting our imagination run wild. Einstein, who incidentally failed at shchool, only realised his theory of relativity because he was lost in his imagination and got swept up on a beam of light. It was through this 'vision' that he went on to change the face of scientific understanding in many areas.
I suppose my thing then is how do we raise children into adults while retaining the full freedom of their imagination? how do we as adults recover our lost imagination and make the pocket of imagination in our heads so full that a much larger container is required, even better, not even try to contain it!! and lastly how do we as respond to people's claims, like my own, that the imagination can be subject to external forces, particularly in a spiritual sense, so that it is not responding to what the head is saying but seems to be responding to something else altogether - or should I be declared mentally ill?
